One of the little odd things that came out of last weekend's Hessen state election was the dismantling of a little piece of text in the Hessen state constitution....which said that the death penalty could be prescribed for a couple of crimes. Some people would be shocked but it has a bit of history to it. HR, our local public TV network, discussed the background.
Germany, all the way through to the late 1940s....had text in the national constitution to approve the death penalty. As the war ended, Hessen moved forward and wrote their constitution up in 1946, and included several lines where the death penalty could be issued by a recognized judge. In 1949, the national constitution was wrapped up and finalized, noting tat the death penalty could not be prescribed for any reason. Deleting it out of the Hessen constitution? Well....it finally came up recently and was part of the items being voted upon.
But there is this curious end to the text. It wasn't an absolute 100-percent approval for the deletion. In fact, state-wide.....it was only 83-percent approval....meaning that around 17-percent of the public wanted the text kept. And in one particular area....Wetterau, it was close to 22-percent who wanted the text to remain.
Historically for Germany, you can go back all the way to 1499....to find some written code or text in the region, that specifies ways that you could end up in capital punishment. When you reach the 1870s period....it's written in a way to be triggered for only two basic reasons: murder and treason. During the Nazi era? Well, this is when things went turbo. From 1933 to 1945, officials figure a minimum of 25,000 death sentences were handed down.
As the war closed down, there was a fair amount of heartburn among jurists and legal minds over the method that the Nazis used, and that led to the no capital punishment decision in 1949.
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